Tag: Prosperity

This is the second collation of articles on why our world is what it is, and how we can change it. Some of these articles are old, as I don’t write as much as I used to about economics, mostly because the decision points for avoiding a completely lousy economy are now in the past. The last decision points were passed by when Barack Obama announced his economics team and refused to try and get rid of, or bypass, Bernanke to enforce decent policy on the Federal Reserve.

However, this economy was decades in the making, and if we do not understand how it happened we will only wind up in a good economy through accident, and, having obtained a good economy, will not be able to keep it. These articles aren’t exhaustive; a better list would include almost five centuries of economic history, at least in summary, and certainly deal with the 19th century and early 20th centuries.

I was heartened that hundreds of people read the articles linked in my compendium on ideology and character so I dare hope that you will, again, read these pieces. If you do, you will walk away vastly better informed than almost anyone you know, including most formal economists, about why the economy is as it is.

The Decline and Fall of Post-war Liberalism

Pundits today natter on and on about income inequality, but the fundamental cause of income inequality is almost always determined by how society distributes power. As power goes, so goes income–and wealth. The last period of broad-based equality was the “Liberal Period,” which started with the Great Depression. You can locate the end of that era at various points from 1968 to 1980, but 1980 was the point at which turning back became vastly difficult. This was the moment when a new political order was born; an order conceived to crush those who were willing and able to fight effectively for their share of income and money.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Why Elites Have Pushed “Free Trade”

Those who are middle-aged or beyond remember the relentless march of free trade agreements, the creation of the WTO, and the endless drumbeat of propaganda about how FREE trade was wonderful, inevitable, and going to make us all rich. It didn’t, and it was never intended to. Fully understanding why “free trade” has only enriched a few requires understanding the circumstances required for free trade to work, the incentives for free trade, and the power dynamics which make free trade perfect for elites who want to become rich (often by destroying the prosperity of their own countries). Free trade is about power, and power is about who gets how much.

The Isolation of Elites and the Madness of the Crowd

All societies change and face new challenges. What matters is how they deal with new circumstances. The US, in specific, and most of the developed world, in general, is in decline because of simple broken feedback loops. Put simply, ordinary people live in a world of propaganda and lies, while the rich and the powerful live in a bubble, isolated from the consequences their decisions have on the majority of the population, or on the future.

The Bailouts Caused the Lousy “Recovery”

This may be the hardest thing to explain to anyone with a connection to power or money: The bailouts are WHY the world has a lousy economy, not why it isn’t even worse. If people cannot understand why this is so, if they cannot understand that other options were, and are, available, other than making the people who destroyed the world economy even richer and more powerful, we will never see a good economy, ever again.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

The Rapid Destruction of Countries

You may have noticed, you probably have noticed, that most countries are becoming basketcases faster and faster. Some are destroyed by war and revolution, others by forced austerity. However it happens, the end of anything resembling a good economy through austerity in places like Greece, the Ukraine, Italy, or Ireland, or through war, in places like Lybia and Syria, is sure. Understand this: What is done to those countries, is being done to yours if you live in the developed world, just at a slower pace–and one day, you, too, will be more valuable dead than alive.

Why Countries Can’t Resist Austerity

Many of you will realize that much of the answer to this is related to the article on free trade. Weakness, national weakness, is built into the world economic system, and done so deliberately. The austerity of the past six years is simply the deliberate impoverishment of ordinary people, for the profit of elites, on steroids. But it is worth examining, in detail, why countries can’t or won’t stop it, and what is required for a country to be able to do so.

Why Public Opinion Doesn’t Matter

We live in the remnants of a mass society, but we aren’t in one any more (though we think we are). In a mass-mobilization society with relatively evenly distributed wealth and income, and something approaching competitive markets, public opinion mattered. If it was not a King, well, it was at least a Duke. Today it matters only at the margins, on decisions where the elites do not have consensus. Understand this, and understand why, or all your efforts to resist will be for nothing.

The Golden Rule

Money, my friends, is Permission, as Stirling Newberry once explained to me. It is how we determine who gets to do what. He who can create money, rules. This is more subtle than it seems, so read and weep.

It’s Not How Much Money, It’s Who We Give It to and Why

We have almost no significant problems in the world today which we could either not have fixed had we acted soon enough, or that we could not fix or mitigate today, were we to act. We don’t act because we misallocate, on a scale which would put Pyramid-building Pharoahs to shame, our social efforts.

Higher Profits Produce a Worse Society

No one ever told you that, I’m sure. Read and learn.

The Fall of the USSR

The USSR fell in large part because of constant and radical misallocation of resources. This misallocation occurred because those running the economy did not receive accurate feedback. Despite the triumphal cries of the West and the managerial class who pretend to be capitalists, a version of this exact problem is at the root of our current decline, and it would serve us well to understand how and why the USSR fell.

What Privatization Does

Of all the ideological bugaboos of our current age, one of the strongest is the idea that private enterprise is always more efficient and better. It’s not, but that belief is a very profitable to our elites, and understanding how the engine of privatization works is essential to understanding both our current economic collapse and how the fakely-bright economies of the neoliberal era–especially the early neoliberal period of Thatcher and Reagan–were generated.

What Prosperity Is and Isn’t

It is, perhaps, odd to put this article so far down the list, but it’s wonky and important and not very dramatic. Simply enough, what we define as prosperity is not prosperity, which is why we are sick, fat, and unhappy with rates of depression and mental illness and chronic disease which dwarf those of our forbears despite having so much more stuff. Fix everything else, but if we insist on continuing to produce that which makes us sick and unhappy, what we have will not be what we need or want, nor will it be, truly, prosperity worth having.

The Four Principles of Prosperity

Prosperity, at its heart, is an ethical phenomenon, as much as it is anything else. Without the right ethics, the right spirit, it will not last, nor be widespread. If we want a lasting prosperity, which is actually good for us, we will start by reforming our public ethics.

How to Create a Good Internet Economy

The internet is wonderful, but despite all the cries of “Progress, progress!” it has mostly made a few people rich, created a prosperous class of software engineers who often lose their jobs in their 50s, and has simultaneously overseen the decline of the prosperity for most people in the developed world. It has not produced the prosperity we hoped it would. Here’s why and how to fix it.

Concluding Remarks

The above is so far from comprehensive as to make me cry, but it’s a start. I do hope that you will read it and come away with a far better idea of why the economy sucks for most people, and a clearer understanding of the fact that it is intended to suck, why it is intended to suck, and how the old, better economy was lost.

(Author’s Note: This was originally published October 6, 2014. I’m putting it back up top, as I have gained many new readers since then.)

When Does Technological Advancement Actually Lead to Prosperity?

By Ian Welsh

On October 29, 2015

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When is a society prosperous? The general understanding seems to be it’s when everyone has an abundance of goods. But is this a useful definition? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but no time to enjoy them? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but you’re sick? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but you live in an oppressive society? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods but are desperately unhappy and feel you’ve wasted your life?

You can argue to keep it simple: Prosperity means everyone has access to a lot of goods and services. But I think this falls flat; we can all understand that more goods don’t necessarily make us better off, nor more services. More foods that make us sick aren’t better. More health care doesn’t mean we’re healthier, it often means we’re sicker. More prisons mean our society is producing more criminals and more crime.

Just increasing economic activity doesn’t make people better off, doesn’t increase prosperity.

The prototypical example of this is the move to agriculture. It would seem self-evident that learning how to grow more food has made us better off. More food is better, right? In fact, however, the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture led to lives which were worse, for the vast majority of the population. People were shorter in most agricultural societies, which indicates worse nutrition. There was far more disease and far more chronic health conditions. People also generally had less free time and they lived fewer years than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them.

Nor was this a short term decline, it lasted for thousands of years. Height is a good measure of nutrition, and we are still not as tall as our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Pelvic depth, which measures how easily women give birth has also never recovered. Median lifespan was not higher for around 6,000 years. And it declined for hundreds of years during that period in certain areas of the world. Members of the Hellenic world, from 300 BC to 120 AD, had longer lives than westerners before the 20th century.(1) Our lives can get worse, and stay worse, for hundreds or thousands of years, despite having more ability to create goods.

Are societies with more food and goods better if the people are sicker, live shorter lives, and have more difficulty reproducing? If that’s prosperity, do we want it?

Instead of more goods, more “stuff,” we should want the right goods and/or the right stuff. Stuff that makes us healthier, happier, smarter, more able to do great works, and to live well. Instead of more work, we should want right work, enough work to make the right stuff, but not so much work we have no time for our loved ones, friends, and doing the activities we love, whatever those might be. And, as much as possible we should want health instead of medicine and low crime rather than prisons.

All other things being equal, yes, more productive capacity is better. The more stuff we can make, in theory, the better off we’ll be. But in practice, it doesn’t always work that way.

Again, part of this is about the right stuff, or the wrong stuff. In our own society we are seeing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes due to our diet, for example. Part of that problem lay with modern hierarchies and inequality. Inequality is undeniably bad for us, as a whole. The more unequal your society is, the lower the median lifespan. The more unequal the society, the sicker, in general. More heart attacks, much more stress. The more unequal, the more crime. These links are robust.

The links run two ways. On the one hand, humans find inequality stressful. The human body, if subject to long term stress, becomes unhealthy and far more likely to be sick. People who feel unequal act less capable than those who feel equal. This is true for the rich and powerful in unequal societies and the poor. Everyone suffers. Though the poor and weak do suffer more, even the rich and powerful would be healthier and live longer in equal societies, most likely simply due to the stress effect.(2)

The second part is distribution, or rather, the question of who gets to control distribution. The more unequal a society, the less stuff the poor and middle class have, comparatively. Some technologies tend to lead to more inequality, some tend to lead to more equality. In most hunter-gatherer societies, there isn’t enough surplus to support a class of rich, powerful people and their servitors–in particular their servitors who enforce the status quo through ideology or violence. With little surplus, there is equality. This doesn’t mean hunter-gatherers live badly, most of them seem to have spent a lot less time producing what they needed than we do, they certainly didn’t work 40 hour weeks, or 60 hour weeks, closer to 20. (3) The rest of the time they could dance, create art, make love, socialize, make music, or whatever else they enjoyed.

Agriculture didn’t lead immediately to inequality, the original agricultural societies appear to have been quite equal, probably even more so than the late hunter-gatherer societies that preceded them. But increasing surpluses and the need for coordination which arose, especially in hydraulic civiliations (civilizations based around irrigation which is labor intensive and requires specialists) led to the rise of inequality. The pharoahs created great monuments, but their subjects did not live nearly as well as hunter-gatherers.

The organization of violence, and the technology behind it, is also a factor. It is not an accident that classical Greece had democracy in many cities, nor that it extended only to males who could fight and not women or non-fighting males. It is not an accident that Rome had citizenship classes based on what equipment soldiers could afford: the Equestrian class was named that because they could take a horse to war. It is not accident that the Swiss Cantons, where men fought in pike formation, were democratic for their time. Nor is it an accident that universal sufferage arose in the age of mass conscription and that women gained the vote as societies moved to mass mobilization.

When Rome moved away from citizen conscription to a professional army it soon lost its liberty. As we move away from mass armies it is notable that, while we haven’t lost the vote formally, the vote seems to matter less and less as politicians increasingly just do what they want, no matter what the electorate might have indicated.

Power matters for prosperity. The more evenly power is spread, the more likely a society is to be prosperous, for no small factions can engage in policies which are helpful to them, but broadly harmful to everyone else. Likewise, widespread demand, absent supply bottlenecks, leads to widespread prosperity as well.

In the current era, we have seen a massive increase in CEO and executive pay. This is due to the fact that they have taken power over the primary productive organizations in our society: Corporations. The owners of most corporations, if they are not also the managers, are largely powerless against the management. It is not that management is more competent than it was 40 years ago, at least at their ostensible job of enriching shareholders, it is that they are more powerful than they were 40 years ago, compared to shareholders and compared to government.

Because increases in the amount we can create do not automatically translate into either creating what is good for us, or into relatively even distribution of what we create, increases in the amount we can create do not always lead to prosperity. Likewise, it certainly does not naturally lead to widespread affluence. Productivity in America rose 80.4 percent from 1973 to 2011, but median real wages rose only 10.2 percent and median male wages rose 0.1 percent. (4) This was not the case from 1948 to 1973, when wages rose as fast as productivity did.

Increases in productivity, in our ability to make more stuff, only lead to prosperity and affluence if we are making the right stuff, and we are actually distributing that stuff widely. If a small group of individuals are able to skim off most of the surplus, prosperity does not result and if a society which is prosperous allows an oligarchy, nobility, or aristocracy to form, even if such an aristocracy (like our own) pretends it does not exist, society will find its prosperity fading.

Creating goods that hurt people is not prosperity either. Currently, about 40 percent of all deaths are caused by pollution or malnutrition.(5) If someone you love has died, there is a good chance they died because we make stuff in ways that pollute the environment, or because the stuff we make, like most of our food, is very bad for us. Being fat is not healthy, and we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Even when we do not immediately die, we suffer from chronic diseases at a rate that would astonish our ancestors. As of the year 2000, for example, approximately 45 percent of the US population suffered from a chronic disease. 21 percent had multiple conditions.(6) Some of this is just due to living longer, but much of it is due to the food we eat, the stress our jobs inflict upon us, and the pollution we spew into the air, land, and water.

We should always remember this. Increases in productive capacity and technological advancement do not always lead to welfare and when they do, they do not automatically do so immediately. The industrial revolution certainly did lead to increased human welfare, but if you were of the generations thrown off the land and made to work in the early factories, often 6 1/2 days a week, in horrible conditions, you would not have thought so. You were, in virtually every way, worse off than you were before by being thrown off the land, and so were your children. A few industrialists and the people around them certainly did very well, but that is not prosperity, nor is it affluence.

And a gain of affluence which lasts less than two centuries and ends in ecological disaster which kills billions, well, our descendents may not call that a success, or nor may they think it was worth it.

Prosperity, in the end, is as much about power and politics as it is about technology and productive ability. The ability to make more things does not ensure we are making the right things, or that the people who need them, get them. Productive capacity which is not shared is not prosperity.

pg 23, Spencer Wells, Pandora’s seed
Inequality book
going from memory on this one
http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/
http://dieoff.org/page165.htm
Anderson G, Horvath J The growing burden of chronic disease in America. Public Health Rep. 2004;119:263-70.

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The First Task for Prosperity Is Ending Artificial Scarcity

By Ian Welsh

On September 8, 2015

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We have more empty homes than homeless people.

We have more food than necessary to feed everyone in the world.

This is not an era of actual scarcity. It is an era of artificial scarcity.

We either already have, or we have the ability to create, a surplus of every necessity that is needed.

This includes housing, food, and clothing. We still have enough water, globally, if we are wiling to be smart about how we use it, and where there are geographical problems regarding access, the problem of access is easily solved. In general, we need to be a bit flexible in how we grow our food; we need to stop draining aquifers and help those farms that over-use aquifer water to grow crops that use less water, or help those farmers find other livelihoods.

Early research shows that intensive urban agriculture creates between three to ten times the food that traditional agriculture does.

We are also short of security. This is another artificial shortage, though it’s harder to fix. Most countries that have been destroyed recently were destroyed in large part because of outside intervention, whether from Western, Eastern, or Jihadi influence. We are in a cycle of blowback after blowback, with the first step being to stop doing things that will cause devastation.

Education is unequally spread throughout the world, but this is another problem which is solveable: We have the books, which cost cents to reproduce, the telecom networks are almost everywhere, and we can train the teachers. If we wanted to spend more money on teachers and less on finance, we wouldn’t have a problem.

Again, most of this “scarcity” is artificial. It is imposed through a money system where a few people have the right to create money, and everyone else has to access it from them. That money is nothing, more or less in this context, than permission to use society’s resources, whether it’s people’s labor or the results of that labor.

The only real restrictions on our ability to supply what people need are overuse of sinks (like carbon) and overuse of resources, whether renewable or non-renewable, but we either have the necessary technology to move away from that overuse, or we have scientists and engineers who would love to create it for us, but who can’t get the resources/money they need to do so.

But much of this is low hanging fruit; we already have enough food and housing and far more textile capacity than we need.

Dividing up the world as we do between countries is a huge problem in which our resources are wasted where they aren’t needed, while others go without. Colonial powers have drawn ineffective and nonsensical borders, as is the case with most of Africa and the Middle East.

By centralizing the production of various resources (and that includes both ideological and intellectual resources) in a few areas and to a few people, we have pooled necessities in places they aren’t needed and denied them to other people.

These are social problems, with social solutions. The idea that technology will “fix” them is somewhat (though not entirely misguided.) We already have the material means to care for everyone, we do not. This cannot be laid directly at the feet of technology–we have had this capacity for at least a century or so.

Oh, and the shortage of spare time for so many; with the shortage of work for others? Complete social construction. We are doing too much of the wrong kinds of work, and too little of the right kinds of work, and those choices are also social.

In the end, scarcity of the goods humans need most is almost always, in the modern world, artificial: It’s a social choice.

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Thoughts on the Year that Was and the World to Come

By Ian Welsh

On January 1, 2015

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Looking back, last year’s writing that hit big was mostly about the Ukrainian crisis. The year before had been about ideology.

Though I intend to write about technology and its effect on society this year, I find I’m slightly at sea.

There is a tendency, when writing about society (either analytically or from the viewpoint of improving–not reforming– it), to fall into one of two camps: “Everything Is Specific” OR “One Ring to Rule Them All.”

Once upon a time my stance was that the US, and the world, had very few problems that were conceptually difficult. They might be technically hard, but what to do was well known.

I haven’t come to disagree with that stance: The sardonic comment that everyone knows that the US needs real universal healthcare remain–it produces better health and costs less. Only the corrupt, the stupid, or the propagandized think otherwise. The same is true of many other problems, from climate change to plastic clogging the seas to fracking, to marginal tax rates, and so on.

We know what would produce a world which was better for the vast majority of people (and animals) living on it. We don’t do those things, except when it becomes profitable. (Solar will start replacing coal because it is cheaper, but it should have and could have been cheaper at least fifteen years ago.)

What I have come to understand is that explaining what needs to be done, and why, is brutally difficult. Getting people to a position where they both want to act on it, and will, is nearly impossible.

You explain one thing (climate change), but it means nothing if you do not link it to other things (industrialization, globalization, financial production incentives, the history of post WWII trade, development economics, inequality). The problems are, in that tired word, “interconnected.”

Most people will never commit to doing the necessary learning to understand how the world works in any meaningful way.

Worse, even if they do, they will likely be mis-educated. They will go to existing intellectual systems like economics and they will be taught theories that are at best partially true and at worse are outright lies. Disciplines, especially academic disciplines, exist because someone is willing to fund them, and whoever that someone is, they have expectations. Business theory; economics; organizational theory, produce what those who are willing to pay for them want. Most of the time, what they want is rationalizations for why they should have more, and let everyone else rot.

So you spend 10 years studying economics, get your PhD, and then get most of everything wrong. Your neo-liberal prescriptions make those parts of the world that take them worse off. (Note, poverty reduction is due to China, China’s success is due to old fashioned mercantalism, not neoliberalism.)

You have an entire discipline based on clearly wrong propositions like humans being utility maximizing machines (and can’t even define utility in a way that doesn’t make it a metaphysical entity). And, applying these theories, you go wrong.

And looking on this edifice; looking on all the ways that people fool themselves or are fooled, is like looking at a jungle and holding only a machete. You aren’t going anywhere without a lot of sweat, and the jungle is just going to close in behind you.

So people turn to one off solutions. If only everyone participates in the gains of an economy it’ll do well. (Well, mostly, but how do you get to that nirvana? This is saying “the world is good if the world is good”.) If only everyone obeys contacts freely entered into, life will be good. (Let’s just completely ignore power imbalances). If only we let markets set prices, the market will produce what we need (but what type of market, we’ve never had free markets setting prices?) If only we have more and better education everyone will be prosperous (so, if everyone has a PhD the economy will be great? What about the half of the population who is below-average intelligence? Fuck’em? And would it work anyway? (No.))

Feel free to insert any “one thing” theory above. They don’t work, or they beg the question. If we had better people, for example, we’d have a better world. But how do we get better people, and what does better even mean?

There have been many attempts to get around these issues. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Smith, Marx, Keynes and so many many more have tried.

Some have succeeded for a time: Keynesian economics of the type practices after WWII produced about 25 good years for much of the world (even Africa saw better real growth in that period.) Confucianism, as run by the early Emperors really did make China better till the State co-0pted it. Christianity was the religion of slaves and foreigners and outcasts for centuries, giving their lives meaning, before it became a regressive scourge used to increase the power of Chieftains who wanted to be Kings, take away the rights of women, and be used for justification of mass murder in Europe and the New World.

The solutions which have been effective (which doesn’t always mean making the world a better place) have all spoken to how people should act. We don’t recognize that in modern theories like those of economics, but be clear, homo ec0nomicus is a prescription. The idea that we should act primarily on self interest was not something that was respectable for most of history and the idea that markets should be the primary price setting mechanism and effectively the primary policy mechanism was also considered insane.

The industrial revolution is not old. A little over a couple centuries, for England, a lot less for most other countries. In the course of human existence, this is nothing. The outcome of it, whether it is good or bad, is not yet clear, despite what most believe. If industry and capitalism kill half the population of the world in avoidable climate crises, hunger and drought, while causing a great die-off of non-human plants and animals, can it be said to be good? If, as there is some evidence, it leads to material affluence while increasing rates of depression and unhappiness, is it successful?

The hydraulic revolution, and to a lesser extent the first agricultural revolution (which did not occur along the river valleys) lead to shorter more disease ridden lives and a massive rise in chronic disease and afflictions like having your teeth rot out of your mouth by the time you were 40. In exchange, we received great monuments and lots of things, but I doubt that peasants on the Nile under the Pharoahs were as happy as their ancestors who had lived on the Nile as hunter-gatherers, as close to the Garden of Eden as one can imagine.

I do not believe in going back to technology from before industrialization: it’s not possible or desirable, and if it were, we’d have to reduce our population by two-thirds to three-quarters. Feel free to volunteer to be among the dead.

Pandora’s box is open, and we must deal with the results.

The irony is that we have, again, produced a cornucopia. We have the potential to create an abundance society, the world over and eventually off this world.

We have much of the technology necessary, and we could direct our research and development towards the remaining technology we need.

Instead, we rely on markets controlled by oligarchs and central banks captured by oligarchs to make most of our decisions about our future.

We have systematically dis-empowered ourselves. Going from mass conscription armies and industrial warfare and mass markets driven by relatively egalitarian citizen-consumers in democracies, to oligarchies with unrepresentative armies increasingly filled with drones (and effective ground combat drones will be here in 10 to 20 years), surveillance states bordering on police states, and democracies which are hollow, where we can choose from Oligarchical faction one, two or maybe three. The differences between them, while real, are within the broad agreement to keep giving the rich more.

And so, we come back to, how do we change the direction of our societies? Our society, for the world is more and more one society.

How do we even explain what is wrong, and present a solution, or solutions?

I will posit here that while we may have problems with Confucius’s solution in terms of specifics, in general he was right. We create a new society based on a new ethics (not morality, but ethics); and that ethics is attached to a way of creating a people who can create and maintain that society; and a way of picking the people to run that society who will do so in the interests of everyone else, and not mainly in their own interest.

The thousand and one specific solutions to each problem (housing, energy, health care, climate change) are important, but they are technical questions guided by ideology. A people led by those who do not want to do these things (or not more than they want to do other things), never will.

So is this my “one thing”?

No. It is backed by an understanding of real world power dynamics; an understanding of human nature and how it is and can be shaped; and it is backed by an understanding of the field of ideas and how those ideas are created by the environment and technology: how that tech and environment creates us.

That grouping of ideas is where I believe a solution lies.

Like all solutions, it will not last. The best we can hope for from any solution set, so long as human nature remains as it is, is perhaps a hundred and fifty years. Sixty to eighty is far more typical, and as with the post WWII solution, you may only get two to three decades.

During that time any solution needs to do two things. It need to fix the environment, and it needs to get us off the planet so we don’t have a single point of failure. Doing so will best be done by a system which produces real prosperity, because both of those projects will require vast productive surpluses.

We have or can reach the technology required for both these projects. The challenge of mastering our destiny is the challenge of mastering ourselves, and that challenge is, as it has always been, both the hardest thing anyone can do, and the most worthwhile.

In the New Year I will continue the project of discovering how to do it. I hope you’ll join me.

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The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Prosperity

Why the Economy Is Bad for Most People and How to Make It Better

When Does Technological Advancement Actually Lead to Prosperity?

Thoughts on the Year that Was and the World to Come